My thoughts on defense.

Navy

08/07/2016

August 7th is the halfway point of Summer. It is also the anniversary of the First Marine Division landing on Guadalcanal, in 1942. And the anniversary of Imperial Germany invading France, in 1914.

On August 7th, 1782, General George Washington created the Order of the Purple Heart. The award was originally created "for military merit", and indeed the reverse of the medal carries that inscription. The award was resurrected in 1932, by the efforts of Generals Charles Summerall and Douglas MacArthur, Chiefs of Staff of the Army between 1927 and 1936. An interesting history from the Department of Veterans Affairs:

Army regulations’ eligibility criteria for the award included: • Those in possession of a Meritorious Service Citation Certificate issued by the Commander-in Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. (The Certificates had to be exchanged for the Purple Heart.) • Those authorized by Army regulations to wear wound chevrons. (These men also had to apply for the new award.) The newly reintroduced Purple Heart was not intended primarily as an award for those wounded in action -- the “wound chevron” worn by a soldier on his sleeve already fulfilled that purpose.

Establishing the Meritorious Service Citation as a qualification for receiving the Purple Heart was very much in keeping with General Washington’s original intent for the award. However, authorizing the award in exchange for “wound chevrons” established the now familiar association of the award with injuries sustained in battle. This was reinforced by Army regulations, which stated that the award required a "singularly meritorious act of extraordinary fidelity service" and that "a wound which necessitates treatment by a medical officer and which is received in action with an enemy, may, in the judgment of the commander authorized to make the award, be construed as resulting from a singularly meritorious act of essential service."

Until Executive Order 9277 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in December 1942 authorized award of the Purple Heart to personnel from all of the military services (retroactive to December 7, 1941), the medal was exclusively an Army award. The Executive Order also stated that the Purple Heart was to be awarded to persons who “are wounded in action against an enemy of the United States, or as a result of an act of such enemy, provided such would necessitate treatment by a medical officer.”

In November 1952, President Harry S. Truman issued an Executive Order extending eligibility for the award to April 5, 1917, to coincide with the eligibility dates for Army personnel. President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 11016 in April 1962 that further extended eligibility to "any civilian national of the United States, who while serving under competent authority in any capacity with an armed force…, has been, or may hereafter be, wounded" and authorized posthumous award of the medal.

Executive Order 12464 signed by President Ronald Reagan in February 1984, authorized award of the Purple Heart as a result of terrorist attacks or while serving as part of a peacekeeping force subsequent to March 28, 1973. The 1998 National Defense Authorization Act removed civilians from the list of personnel eligible for the medal.

Given yesterday's anniversary, and all those who decry from the safety of seven decades of time Truman's decision to use two atomic weapons to end the war with Japan, the Purple Heart carries another sobering bit of history. In July of 1945, the War Department ordered the minting of 500,000 Purple Hearts in anticipation of the casualties for Operation Olympic, the invasion of the Japanese home island of Kyushu. Of course, the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought about an end to the war, and the invasion of Kyushu (and then Honshu) proved mercifully unnecessary.

Since 1945, every Purple Heart awarded for the Korean War, Vietnam, Desert Storm, the Cold War, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and all the skirmishes in between has come from that minting for the invasion of Japan. More than one hundred thousand remain unissued.

07/14/2016

(URR here.) Very interesting explanation of the tactics and weapons involve in ASW. Cool footage of the S-2F and the P-2V Neptune, to boot. Gotta dig the midnight-blue paint schemes, too.

The Soviets in the late 1940s, with the German Type XXI technology at their disposal, began producing Whiskey-class diesel boats in huge numbers. This caused something akin to near-panic for the West, as loss of the sea lanes would spell disaster should the Cold War turn hot. US Navy counter to these boats (and the Romeos and Zulus, all capable of roughly double the submerged speed of the German Type VII and IX series boats of the recent war) included modification of a great many Sumner and Gearing-class DDs into sub hunters (DDH) and sub killers (DDK), fitted with ahead-throwing weapon systems (Hedgehog) and significant sonar upgrades. In the air, the development of the rockets, depth bombs, and homing torpedoes discussed in the video gave great advantage to aircraft, as did airborne radar and MAD (magnetic anomaly detection) gear. True aerial ASW had only been in existence for about 12 years, and until these systems matured, was largely limited to attacks on surfaced boats, or depth charge attacks in suspected locations. Eighteen minutes, and change. Worth the watch.

06/21/2016

(URR here. This is a re-post from 2012 on the 75th anniversary of the beginning of BARBAROSSA. This was also my very first post over here at XBRAD's place.)

Those were Adolf Hitler’s words in December of 1940, as he revealed to his senior Wehrmacht Field Marshals and Generals his plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

At a few minutes past 0300 on the morning of 22 June 1941, the rumble of 8,000 artillery pieces shook the western positions of the Red Army, all along the new borders of the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, more than 3,300 aircraft roared overhead on their way to attack Soviet airfields, troop concentrations, command posts, and artillery positions. The most fateful day of the Twentieth Century had begun.

In the west, the Wehrmacht of Hitler’s Third Reich consisted of 2.5 million men and more than 4,000 tanks comprising 180 divisions, organized into three massive Army Groups, which were poised to smash their ideological and political enemies, the Bolshevik dictatorship of Stalin’s Soviet Russia.

Opposing the German onslaught was more than 3 million soldiers of Stalin’s Red Army. Numerically superior to its German opponent in men, aircraft (4,000), and tanks (more than 7,000), the armies on the Soviet western boundary were nonetheless abysmally led and poorly trained. Still reeling from Stalin’s 1937-39 purges of most of its officer corps, and from the bloody humiliation of the disastrous “Winter War” with Finland in the winter of 1939-40, the Red Army was ill-prepared for war against a modern western foe.

The Wehrmacht, on the other hand, was a finely tuned weapon of mechanized warfare, having conquered Poland two years earlier, and overrun France in less than six weeks in 1940. Superbly trained and equipped with modern armor and the most advanced combat aircraft, the three German Army Groups shattered the Soviet forces opposite them. The Luftwaffe swept the Red Air Force, the VVS, from the skies and smashed it on the ground. By the end of the second day, more than 2,300 Soviet aircraft had been destroyed. The Red Army was already being shattered and destroyed piecemeal, in what would be the “great battles of encirclement” of that summer and autumn of 1941, from which few escaped death or captivity. The eradication of the VVS was nearly complete. Nearly. The Red Army almost bled to death. Almost. Yet, somehow, they held on.

Operation BARBAROSSA, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, more than any other, was Hitler’s war. It was the war of Mein Kampf, the war for Lebensraum in the East, whose purpose was to open the great steppes for colonization by the Aryan race. It was a war not just of conquest but of subjugation and annihilation, fought with a brutality that had not been seen in Europe since the Tatar conquests of seven centuries before. It was a war of unspeakable horror and unimaginable suffering, by soldier and civilian alike. Prisoners on both sides died by the millions, worked to death as slave labor, starved, or simply shot or hanged out of hand. But it was also a war of grim and fatalistic heroism on both sides. The German-Soviet conflict, when it ended in the rubble of Berlin nearly four years later, would take the lives of almost twenty-three million souls.

Some of the most enduring images of the Eastern Front, and for the Soviets the Great Patriotic War, are of columns of Russian and German prisoners forlornly marching to their fates (the Russians seemingly always in the dust of the summer, the Germans in the bitter cold of winter). And of grainy images of executions and hangings by the German SS Einsatzgruppen, and far less publicized, of the execution of suspected Russian collaborators by field units of the NKVD, the terror apparatus of Stalin’s brutal regime.

There are lessons and cautions abundant in examining this titanic struggle. Cautions about underestimating one’s enemy, his will to fight for family and homeland. The Russian soldier, deemed racially inferior and incapable of waging modern war, proved individually tough, able to endure hardship and privation in startling measure. He was also fanatical in the defense, fierce in the attack, and bore a hatred of the “blue-eyed oaf” that would be carried across the borders of Prussia with terrible effect.

The Russian was also capable of producing simple but highly effective weaponry, and of mastering its employment. The T-34 and KV-1 tanks that began to appear in the autumn of 1941 were superior to any German design. Soviet aircraft began to close the technology gap with the Luftwaffe far faster than anticipated. Soviet artillery, superior to the Germans even in June of 1941, would dominate the battlefield as the Red Army’s “God of War”. All these would surprise and confound the German commanders who were told to expect an enemy of limited intellect and poor character.

There are also many myths and misconceptions surrounding the struggle between these oppressive dictatorships. Here are two:

The Wehrmacht was not capable of winning a short (ten-week) war against the Soviet Union.

Because the Germans did not win does not mean they were not capable of winning, or the Soviets capable of losing. Had the Ostheer kept its focus on Moscow as the main objective (the plan was to surround, not enter the city), and had Hoth’s Panzers been unleashed in the first week of August, rather than frittered away in other operations until October, the capture of the European capital of the Soviet Union was within its capabilities. Perhaps even more important than the purely political prize was the massive Soviet war industry that occupied the so-called “Moscow-Gorky Space”. Siberian forces did not begin to arrive to defend the city and its immediate area in significant numbers until late September, 1941. The capture of the Soviet war industry, which included the massive tank works at Gorky itself, and the aircraft engine factory at Kuibyshev, would have deprived the Soviet Union of its most valuable asset, the ability to replace the massive combat losses with more modern and capable equipment. Had those factories been destroyed or fallen into German hands, there would have been no MiG or Yak fighters, no Il-2 Sturmoviks, no PE-2s, or any of the other increasingly modern aircraft that would eventually sweep the Luftwaffe from the sky. There would have been no replacement divisions of T-34/76 and /85 tanks, no self-propelled guns, no artillery pieces to replace those lost in the massive battles or worn out in extensive combat. Without those factories and the hardware they produced, there would have been no rehabilitation of the VVS or of the Red Army into the juggernaut that crushed Army Group Vistula into bits and eventually subsume eastern Germany.

The Soviet Union was capable of defeating Nazi Germany without Allied assistance.

While it is true that the Soviet Union bore the unquestioned preponderance of the weight of German arms (at various times, 80% of German combat power was employed in the East, and nearly 80% of all German losses were inflicted by the Soviets), and the suffering and casualties of the Soviet military and civilian population exceeded the rest of the Allies combined by a wide margin, Stalin’s Russia could not have won the war without Allied, and particularly American, assistance. While many are familiar with pictures of some of the 9,000 US and British tanks shipped to the Soviets under Lend-Lease, these represented only about 20% of Soviet tank production during the war. There is little question upon any examination, however, that there were two absolutely critical areas of direct assistance were the linchpins of the survival of the Soviet Union in the dark days of 1941-43, and their drive to ultimate victory in 1944-45. The first of these areas was in food production. The United States shipped more than seventeen MILLION tons of food, wheat and canned goods, to the Soviet Union whose agricultural bread basket was under German occupation. That food sustained the Red Army and Russian war industry workers when none other was available. Without it, the prospects for Soviet victory would have been slim indeed. The second item so critical to the Soviet war effort was the supply of more than half a million American trucks. Tough, six-wheel drive vehicles which carried logistical supplies from the rear areas to the front, and which mounted the famous 122mm Katyusha rocket launchers by the tens of thousands, allowed the Red Army to supply itself on the battlefield in the defensive struggles of 1942 and carried that Army to the great offensive drives that eventually smashed the German Ostheer. Those trucks represent more than 70% of total Soviet vehicle production, freeing their industries to produce the war weapons, tanks, artillery pieces, and armored vehicles that equipped the Red Army.

The final victory of the Soviet Union is, however, a testament to the tough, fierce, and brave Russian soldier. His image, the hardened veteran soldier sitting atop a T-34 with PPSh in hand, scanning for a glimpse of the hated enemy, his mustard-colored quilt uniform covered with dust and snow, will endure for centuries in the collective consciousness of the Russian people.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union has never been comprehensively treated. The subject is far too large. It is too complex and incapable of being understood, except gradually, within the context of its salient events, and those of the rest of the world during and since. A thousand volume work on the subject would still require an explanation and a qualification that such a work was by no means all-inclusive. Yet, it remains one of the most compelling subjects for historians, social and military, because of the world-altering impact of the events themselves and their decades-long aftermath. The magnitude of the struggle defies modern understanding. As does the agony of the armies and the peoples locked in the grips of that mortal struggle.

And so it is likely to remain. And it began with the flash of cannon and the roar of engines, in the morning darkness, seventy-one years ago today.

PS: I am humbled and grateful to xbradtc for allowing me the intellectual pleasure of writing on this blog. And for his unwavering faith that a Marine actually knew how to write, and that I wouldn’t eat the crayons.

05/26/2016

URR here. At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, and somewhat ungracious, I ask something from all of you out there.

Please, do not wish me, or anyone else a "Happy Memorial Day". Memorial Day is a day for honoring the memories of all those who traded their tomorrows so that we might have ours. Those who gave their lives in action against America's enemies. It is not a "happy" day. It is day for somber reflection. Our thoughts should be with wives, mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters, children, who will spend the the rest of their mortal days bearing the loss of a loved one.

Also, don't ask how I plan to "celebrate" Memorial Day. The day is not one of celebration, but one of commemoration. And giving thanks to God for such men (and women) who gave their last full measure of devotion to the cause of Liberty.

This is not to say not to enjoy the fruits of our freedoms, spending time together with friends and loved ones. By all means, do. But somewhere, between the laughter and the smiles and the enjoyment of all we cherish, take the time to remember. Just for a moment.

04/11/2016

Given the huge numbers of flush deck four piper destroyers in reserve after World War I, the Navy had a hard time convincing Congress to allocate funds for destroyer construction during the Great Depression. Nonetheless, small numbers of modern designs were built to display the state of the art, and keep development ongoing. Laid down in 1934 and commissioned in 1936, the USS Mahan was the lead ship of a class of 18 modern destroyers. Of the class, six would be lost in the war, and the other 12 retired as obsolete after the Second World War.

At 1500 tons, and 341 feet long, we begin to see the characteristics that would eventually evolve into the Fletcher and Gearing/Sumner class destroyers built in vast numbers for World War II service.

The primary armament was three sets of quadruple torpedo tubes, in an unusual layout. One quad launcher was atop the centerline deckhouse between the first and second funnels. Aft, there were quad launchers on the main deck port and starboard. Thus, as many as 8 torpedoes were available for any one broadside, and four held in reserve should the ship wish to re-attack.

Five 5”/38 caliber guns were mounted, with the two forward guns having partial shields, and the three after guns on base ring mounts, but with no gunhouses.

04/06/2016

Some bits of family history stick with you. During his only wartime cruise, with VA-35 embarked with Air Wing 9 aboard the USS Enterprise in 1966-1967, Dad once escorted Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, chief of the Republic of Vietnam’s air force, out to a visit aboard Enterprise. Maintaining good relations with our ally was an important matter. And I’d seen pictures in the cruise book of Ky aboard the Big E. But I’d always assumed Dad just hopped an Intruder ashore and picked him up. What I didn’t realize was that there was a whole gaggle of Intruders along for the flight.

Nothing exciting happens in the video. Just some flying in some pretty weather. If you like Intruders, well, it’s always nice to see them.

But understand, I never saw Dad fly the Intruder. In fact, the only thing I ever saw Dad fly was a UH-46 from the air station’s SAR detachment. So seeing him flying an Intruder is a bit of an emotional thing for me. I suspect he’s in 504, and I’ll try to check the logbooks later.

03/25/2016

This video is a couple years old (for instance, the ship is actually in drydock at Charlestown Navy Yard right now) but it is still a very informative video. I'm not sure why there are segments regarding The Hermitage and the Cryptologic Museum, but that's not so bad.

02/29/2016

Following the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines in December of 1941, the US and Great Britain had agreed to the formation of the American, British, Dutch, and Australian Command (known as ABDACOM), whose mission was to prevent the Japanese from overrunning the strategic western-held islands in the Malay Barrier. The impressive-sounding ABDACOM was in reality, anything but.

By the time the ABDA Command was formed on 1 January 1942, under British General Sir Archibald Wavell, Allied air power in the Far East had been all but destroyed. The Japanese had decimated US air forces in the Philippines (including the Navy PBY Catalinas around Cavite), while British and whatever Dutch air power had been shredded in aerial combat, bombed out of existence, or overrun by Japanese ground forces. The naval components of the ABDA were little better. The US Asiatic Fleet under Thomas C. Hart consisted of one Treaty "tin-clad" heavy cruiser, USS Houston (CA-30), the obsolete light cruiser Marblehead (CL-12), thirteen old Clemson-class flush-deck destroyers, a handful of elderly Yangtze and ocean-going gunboats, and some tenders. The most viable part of the Asiatic Fleet were 23 modern submarines, along with six elderly World War I-vintage S-boats.

The other contributors to the naval component of ABDA were the thinly-stretched Royal Navy, the remaining Dutch forces in Java and Dutch East Indies, and the Australians. With the loss of Force Z, battle cruiser Repulse and battleship Prince of Wales, Royal Navy forces in the Far East by 1942 consisted merely of a few cruisers and destroyers, many in need of overhaul. The Dutch had a few light cruisers, none a match for their Japanese foes, some destroyers, and submarines which operated out of Java. The Australian Navy, similarly, contributed a few light units. The grandly-named ABDA Strike Force, commanded by Dutch Admiral Karel Doorman, was really a hotch-potch of Allied ships of varying degrees of usefulness.

While there were some successes by Dutch submarines under Admiral Helfrich in Java, US submarines were hampered by poor planning and positioning, the notorious problems with the Mk 14 torpedo, and the vulnerability of their bases at Cavite and Manila to Japanese air attack. In surface actions, ABDA naval forces had been brushed aside in the Makassar Strait, had been roughly handled by Japanese land-based aircraft off Sumatra, and mauled by a smaller IJN force in a night battle in the Badung Strait. On each occasion, the ABDA naval forces could not prevent Japanese landings. The fall of Singapore on 15 February deprived ABDACOM of anything resembling a proper headquarters for commanding the widely dispersed fragments of the forces at their disposal.

By the time the Japanese were discovered preparing for the conquest of Java, the ABDA Strike Force had been reduced by losses against IJN forces in the aforementioned battles. Marblehead had been all but wrecked by Japanese bombers at Makassar Strait, with Houston having Number Three 8-inch turret knocked out of action in the same fight. Dutch light cruiser HNLMS Tromp had been damaged at Badung Strait, and several destroyers and smaller units had been sunk over the course of the previous two months. Without a forward drydock and proper repair facilities, battle damage could not be made good. Marblehead limped more than 15,000 miles via South Africa, back to Brooklyn Navy Yard, to be repaired. Though she survived, she was lost to the ABDA Strike Force permanently.

On 27 February 1942, the remnants of the ABDA Strike Force, under Admiral Doorman, sailed into the Java Sea to block the Japanese invasion force. The two sides appeared to be fairly evenly matched, but closer investigation shows otherwise. The Japanese force consisted of two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and fourteen destroyers. They were also saddled with the task of protecting eleven transport vessels carrying the Java invasion force. Doorman's Strike Force was comprised of two heavy cruisers, HMS Exeter (of Graf Spee fame), the damaged Houston, and three light cruisers, Doorman's flag HNLMS DeRuyter, HNLMS Java, and HMAS Perth. In addition, Doorman had nine destroyers, of varying ages and quality. The Japanese heavy cruisers were, however, far more powerful than their Allied counterparts, much larger, faster, and better protected, and carrying ten 8-inch guns each, to Exeter's six, and Houston's six (three on the after 8-inch turret had not been repaired). Japanese destroyers were also far more powerful and larger than their opponents, greatly superior in gun power and shipping the lethal 24" Type 93 Long Lance torpedo.

The two forces sighted each other at about 1600 on the afternoon of 27 February. Ragged gunnery yielded few results until Exeter was struck in her boiler room by an 8-inch shell, causing her speed to drop. She heeled out of line and retired toward Surabaya with an escort of a destroyer. Dutch destroyer Kortenaer was struck by a Long Lance torpedo, exploded, and sank.

As darkness closed, destroyer HMS Electra engaged in a running gun duel with two Japanese destroyers, was riddled with hits, and had to be abandoned. The American destroyers expended all their torpedoes in an attack just after dark, but with no effect. The destroyers then retired to Surabaya. Worse was yet to come. Another destroyer, HMS Jupiter, struck a mine and sank. The Japanese would prove yet again their mastery of night actions, pounding DeRuyter and Java with gunfire, and sinking them with a salvo of torpedoes. Admiral Doorman went down with his flagship, along with all but 111 survivors of her crew and those of Java, who became prisoners of the Japanese.

The sacrifice of the ABDA Strike Force had caused almost no damage to the Japanese force (a single destroyer had significant damage and retired), and had delayed Japanese landings by less than a day.

When Exeter, and the surviving cruisers of the Strike Force (Perth and Houston) reached Surabaya and Jakarta, respectively, they found no means to affect anything other than temporary repairs. To make matters worse, there was neither fuel nor ammunition in Jakarta for Perth and Houston, who departed after dark on 28 February to try and make a run to Australia. In doing so, the two cruisers ran into a Japanese invasion fleet headed for West Java. The Allied warships managed to damage three Japanese transports, before being sunk in the early morning darkness of 1 March 1942.

Exeter put to sea at reduced speed from Surabaya for Ceylon, but flooding in her forward sections made her draft too deep for transiting the Bali Strait. She, with two destroyers, USS Pope and HMS Encounter, also limped toward the Sunda Strait. There, four Japanese cruisers and seven destroyers lay in wait, engaging and sinking the crippled Exeter and Encounter with gunfire at midday on 1 March. USS Pope was hunted down and sunk a few hours later. The ABDA Strike Force had ceased to exist.

Nowhere were the Japanese seriously interdicted by the ABDA naval or air forces. ABDACOM existed for just sixty days. The 1 March 1942 actions in Sunda Strait completed the annihilation of all meaningful Allied naval forces in the Far East.

The bravery of the Allied sailors, their suffering and sacrifice, deserves to be remembered. But like so much of history, the ABDA story should serve as a cautionary tale. Stationing weak, inadequate forces far from defended bases, or in bases subject to powerful enemy attack, carries tremendous risk. The enemy's calculus for that risk is very likely not to match your own. War planning that does not provide effective and achievable concepts of operations under realistic conditions renders initiative automatically to a capable adversary when hostilities commence. Reliance upon unproven and inadequately tested technologies to be decisive advantages in a war at sea is a fool's errand. Assumed advantages in quality of training and equipment represents dangerous arrogance that always costs lives, and sometimes costs wars.

The most indelible lesson from the ABDA debacle was one which should particularly resonate today. The projection of power ashore from the sea, dismissed today by so many suffering from "end of history" myopia, proved absolutely decisive in the Japanese push south. Then, as now, there were loud choruses declaring such operations to project power ashore were things of the past, obsolete in the more lethal mid-century wars, invoking the failure at Gallipoli and citing the capabilities of modern defensive weapons. Yet the Japanese continued to land, conquering and building bases from which land-based air power and striking capability could be launched, and leapfrogged across an area larger than the Indian Ocean, rolling up British, Dutch, Australian, and American forces in fewer than 90 days from the outbreak of hostilities. Such a lesson should be even more indelible today for us, in light of the fact that the US did precisely the same to the Japanese from mid-1942 on, from Guadalcanal and Efate and Ulithi and Guam and Tinian, all the way to Okinawa, to threaten the Home Islands by 1945.

Even if we decide to be so foolish as to cast such lessons into the dustbin of history, our adversaries certainly are not. They understand, as we should, that war in the Western Pacific will look very much like war in the Western Pacific. And they are planning accordingly. Satellite images of reclaimed land, helicopter bases, anti-ship cruise missiles, and target acquisition radars speak loudly to that fact. I do hope we are listening.